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Andrej Karpathy says humans are now the bottleneck in AI research with easy-to-measure results

THE DECODER / 3/22/2026

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Key Points

  • Karpathy argues that humans are now the bottleneck in AI research, with progress increasingly tied to easy-to-measure, scalable improvements.
  • He notes that an autonomous agent was able to optimize his training setup overnight, uncovering improvements he had missed after twenty years of experience.
  • The piece highlights limitations of RLHF and suggests automation could change how researchers experiment and iterate.
  • Overall, the article portrays a shift toward automated optimization and measurement as a driver of AI progress, with broad implications for researchers and product teams.

Former OpenAI researcher Andrej Karpathy criticizes the fact that reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF) is only effective to a limited extent when training AI language models.

AI developer Andrej Karpathy let an autonomous agent optimize his training setup overnight, and it found improvements he'd missed despite two decades of experience.

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